Fighting back against MAGA misinformation and disinformation

By Don Rojas

(Editor’s Note: Below are the comments of Don Rojas at the tribute /BWMN fundraising event at Brooklyn’s House of the Lord Church on October 15, 2024.)

Thanks, Bro. Ron.

Good evening, Sisters and brothers, friends and comrades. Revolutionary greetings to all.

First and foremost, giving all praises and glory to God and the Ancestors, I wish to thank everyone for your birthday wishes and for your touching tributes. I am truly humbled and honored.

I wish to express special gratitude to Dr. Ron Daniels for organizing this event and to Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles for his video presentation. These two tireless brothers are giants of our people and an inspiration to activists and reparations advocates around the world.

Many thanks also to the venerable Pastor Herbert Daughtry and his wife Karen and the rest of the Daughtry family for making available their legendary House of the Lord Church, an epicenter of righteousness and activism in the heart of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn in New York City. The Daughtry family continues to be a source of strength and inspiration for me and so many others and its fitting that tonight we send them revolutionary salutations and wish them good health and long life.

To the sisters and brothers in the live audience who have taken time out in the middle of a work week to participate in this evening’s event, please accept my deepest apologies for not being there in the flesh with you this evening for reasons related to my health. I thank you all for your prayers and best wishes as I continue my battle with cancer. I am truly blessed.

We are also gathered this evening to give financial support to the Black World Media Network, a digital media project that I conceived, and we launched during Black History Month two years ago. The network is essentially a 24×7 Internet radio station featuring danceable and inspiring progressive music from Black America, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America along with news, commentaries, podcasts and special features. Via downloadable apps you can listen to the station’s Livestream on your computer, laptop, tablet and even your cell phone, anytime, anywhere in the world.

The network is a non-commercial, non-partisan, truly independent media dedicated to uniting and serving Black and Brown communities and nations across the globe. We depend on your ongoing financial support to pay the bills for streaming and hosting and to modestly compensate the incredible team that keeps it broadcasting.

We are asking for your financial support as well as your promotional support tonight and in the days and weeks ahead. Please donate whatever you can afford and help us spread the word about the Network by sharing it with your family, friends and colleagues. The strategic objective of the network is to assist the process of strengthening Black and Brown solidarity across the world and support the growing global reparations movement.

In addition to providing a healthy mix of entertainment and information, our network is dedicated to combatting the toxic and vile twins of misinformation and disinformation that’s being spread by the orange man and his misguided minions with increasing frequency as we move closer to the Nov. 5 elections in the USA, which will be the most consequential elections in our lifetime with serious implications for the entire Black World.

This disinformation campaign is manifested in a long litany of nasty lies and crazy-ass conspiracy theories, repeated incessantly to the point where millions of people unfortunately believe they are valid and credible. It sounds more and more every day like Hitler’s evil propaganda campaigns that were cooked up by Goebbels and his team of fascist propagandists back in the 1920s and 30s in Germany.

Independent media like ours must push back aggressively on this anti-truth campaign and so, moving forward, I’ll make myself available for counsel and advice to the superb team at the network, to Rennie, Rick, Kyle et al.

This MAGA phenomenon poses an existential threat to Black and Brown people and other people of color, as well as to white people of conscience and good will. MAGA is a dangerous cancer on the body politic that is metastasizing rapidly. The international dimensions of its 2025 agenda poses serious threats to countries in the global south, especially to countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America, a threat that transcends our political, linguistic and geographical boundaries. So, It is imperative that we unite to fight against this threat.

Today’s “Make America Great Again” movement is not the same old right-wing of the capitalist consensus, but a radicalized neo-fascist force that will be present and active, no matter who wins the upcoming elections.

The Orange Man, as Bro. Ron has dubbed him, did not create the MAGA phenomenon. He gave this already existing force a name and like the narcissistic, opportunistic, racist and deranged megalomanic that he is, the Orange Man has bamboozled tens of millions of people (who he disdains and has no affinity with) into supporting his lust for power. The 2025 agenda is designed to protect and defend the white skin color privileges of his rabid supporters who will happily attack Black and Brown people and innocent migrants.

For the MAGA minions, hate is their unifying ideology, and their white identity trumps all other types of identity. They believe that their whiteness affords them more rights and opportunities than people of color.

They offer no uplifting vision of the future for voters. Thier’s is a white supremacist agenda which seeks to turn back the clock of history to the days of American apartheid aka “Jim Crow” and some would want to go even further back to the era of chattel enslavement of African people in the US and in the broader Americas.

They see the demographics of America changing before their eyes and they are panicking, and so they have turned to a fraudulent con man to be their “savior.” They fear that a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy is emerging in the USA. They are terrified at the “browning of America” and are ready and willing to turn to violence to stop this trend but they are deluded, and they must be resisted.

The manifest failures of neoliberalism are multiplying while the neo-fascist movement threatens to replace a flawed democracy with something fundamentally and frighteningly worse.

We at the Black World Media Network (and IBW) are committed to combating these dangerous tendencies. With your generous support, we can grow the network into an effective Pan-Africanist foil to the MAGA phenomenon.

Your contributions will help us to broadcast news and commentaries in several languages soon, and we invite you to work with us to enhance the interactive capacity of the network so that we create vibrant digital spaces where our people across the world can talk to each other regularly, plan together and share perspectives and stories about their struggles for dignity and respect, for real sovereignty and economic self-determination in a world dominated more and more by the neo-colonial ideology we call neoliberalism.

Sisters and Brothers, I came to the US as a 19-year-old immigrant from the English-speaking Caribbean in 1968, an immigrant who grew up in the Caribbean under British colonialism and with the blood of Africa and of colonial Spain coursing through my veins. And, as an immigrant, my heart aches for our Haitian sisters and brothers in Springfield, Ohio who are under siege by the KKK and for those families who have crossed rivers, jungles and valleys on a long dangerous journey by foot to reach the Southern border of the US seeking entry so that they could pursue the elusive “American Dream”.

These brave, and sometimes desperate, black and brown people do not come from “shithole countries” and are not eaters of cats and dogs. They are not invading forces of aliens. They are flesh and blood human beings like us in search of a better life for themselves and their children. They have hopes and dreams and aspirations just like the rest of us. Let’s stand in solidarity with them.

So, sisters and brothers, friends and comrades, the struggle for a brave new world continues. The struggle for a future of justice and equality moves on. The struggle to build a future of peace and joy is our collective call to action.

Let us continue to coalesce our global family around shared human rights and common cultural and historical values. Let us corral our energies and talents to build a future of optimism over pessimism, joy over despair, creativity over carnage, positivity over negativity, cooperation over discord, justice over exploitation and oppression, peace over war, light over darkness and dystopia.

As I wind down my work activities into a form of semi-retirement, I do not intend to sail off into a beautiful tropical sunset. I’m not quitting the struggle because the spirit of the Grenada Revolution which burns in my soul tells me that I still have a responsibility and a duty to work for human liberation. That is the spirit of resistance and complete independence.

So, I intend to spend more quality time with my grandchildren, catch up on some long-deferred reading, work on my memoirs, continue to be a student of our people’s history and channel whatever energy I have left mostly into the global reparations movement.

I will also advocate for the practice of participatory democracy in Black and Brown countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America; a popular form of democracy that goes beyond the act of voting every 4 or 5 years to active, daily engagement of the masses in governance and in the process of equitable and sustainable development.

Participatory, grassroots democracy as was demonstrated briefly during the years of the Grenada Revolution is a crucial complement to representative, Parliamentary democracy and the most effective and viable alternative to the current political and economic dominance of neoliberalism and its instruments like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

And, moving forward, our Black World Media Network will create programming that encourages regular and consistent mass participation and civic engagement in the democratic processes in countries throughout the Black World.

Finally, my sincere thanks once again to all those participating and witnessing this event for your support and solidarity over the years. Let us stay connected and let us move together into a joyful tomorrow with collective determination to never turn back but to forever move forward.

Peace and Blessings,

One Heart, One Destiny, One Love!! d